Papers delivered by Martyn Woodward
The history of objects is increasingly being understood as more vital than that of texts; of soci... more The history of objects is increasingly being understood as more vital than that of texts; of socio-cultural and political actions and narratives (Shryock and Smail, 2011). The current strands of Media Archaeological approaches to the study of objects (Parikka, 2012; Zielinski, 2002) provide access to the non-linear history of material networks; non-human histories of technologies, arts and media. An onto-epistemology of objects, in this context, would comprise more a play amongst a plurality of material and non-material agents (human, material and non-human).
A media archaeology of artistic objects would require a different approach to that of media technologies; one that can account for the plurality of agents, but more importantly a plurality of consciousness from which the work itself is brought forth — the processes by which the artwork comes into being leaves its trace upon its material form (Crowther, 2011; Merleau-Ponty, 1961). An artistic reflection upon a media archaeology of artefacts, such as a photographers contact sheet and photographic images themselves, will be used to elaborate upon the non material affective forces that constitute its ontology; the consciousness of the artist, materials and the technologies, that bring the work into existence.
This paper will elucidate these points and aim to reveal the importance of an ontological and philosophical understanding of artefacts for the emerging media archaeological and art historical discourses within the humanities.
Crowther, P. (2011) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1961) ‘Eye and Mind,’ Translated by Eddie, J.M., in Eddie, J.M.
(ed) The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Reprint, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159-190.
Shryock, A. and Smail, D. (2011) Deep History: The Architecture of the Past and
Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zielinski, S. (2008) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. London: The MIT Press.
Material Engagement Theory (MET) (Knappett and Malafouris, 2008; Malafouris, 2013) has become an ... more Material Engagement Theory (MET) (Knappett and Malafouris, 2008; Malafouris, 2013) has become an exemplar for understanding the deeply interactive connection between mind and environment within cognitive archaeology, re-raising many well versed philosophical questions regarding how the material world contributes to the development of the human mind. Where the focus upon the interaction of these domains is of great importance, it is the presupposition of an interaction itself that may restrict the richness of such an endeavour. The ‘radically enactive’ paradigm (Varela et al. 1993; Thompson, 2007) underpinning MET posits that the material world does not so much contribute to human cognition — through the interaction of two independent entities — it is always already of what we might describe as human experience, experience and environment emerge reciprocally. How does this reciprocity change the way we think about the material world? How does it effect how we might approach the archaeological study of material artefacts?
The creative intermingling of material world and experience is what Tim Ingold (2013) describes as a correspondence in which we do not so much inter-act with a static world as always correspond with an animate one; properties are more like ‘qualities’ of an emergent whole that take on certain characteristic of what they correspond too. Artefacts such as kites, lasso’s and baskets (Ingold, 2013) express this correspondence of human, environment and material worlds through their formal structures, styles and use, and the changes of these features over time. This paper will focus attention upon the style of human artefacts by borrowing from the phenomenological tradition of painting (Crowther, 2011, 2012; Merleau-Ponty, 1961), describing how the compositional strategies and qualities of line give a visual expression to a particular way of acting in the world. Such an expression is a process of rendering visible the invisible temperament and experience of the artist that are intermingled with the ‘properties’ (or forces) of the environment that emerge in correspondence; the canvas, the brush, the paint, and environmental conditions — offering empirical access to the historical ‘qualities’ of the material world that that practitioners movements corresponds too.
A contemporary interest in the often-neglected geological 'deep time' of the late nineteenth ce... more A contemporary interest in the often-neglected geological 'deep time' of the late nineteenth century regarding the study of human history within the humanities, arises with questions regarding the material and immaterial limits of the development of human cognition, and the methods by which a human history is documented (Shryock and Smail, 2011). What has been termed a 'deep human history' attempts to study the development of such a distributed human cognition and creative activity through the traces of the development of human cognition and consciousness that extend into, and are left upon the environment: the material artefacts, objects and materials of a culture.
This paper, through a juxtaposition of diverse visual ephemera drawn from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century: that of geological images, biblical depictions, modern painting, satirical illustrations and everyday depictions of emerging technologies, will trace the 'deep time' aspects of the development of a historically contingent imagination, cognition and perception that manifest within such depictions of the human form. Utilising especially the anthropological concept of meshwork (Ingold, 2011), and the neuroarchaeological concept of 'enactive signification' (Malafouris, 2007), this paper will point to an approach to the study of the development of human depictions that acknowledges the material and immaterial dimensions of human cognition and perception. By juxtaposing these approaches with that of contemporary art historical methods (Papapetros, 2012) it will point particularly to the importance of the multi-sensory, imaginary and spiritual dimensions of cognition that will be argued as entangled within the meshworks of material
engagement.
References
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London, Routledge.
Malafouris, L. 2007. Before and beyond representation: towards an enactive conception of the Palaeolithic image. In: Renfrew, C. and Morley, I. (eds.) Image and Imagination: A Global History of Figurative Representation. Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. pp. 289–302.
Papapetros, S. 2012. On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Shryock, A. and Smail, D. (eds) 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley, University of
California Press.
_______
Why should we start taking the (im)material seriously in HCI, and how can we start?
We ask the a... more Why should we start taking the (im)material seriously in HCI, and how can we start?
We ask the above question not because we can answer it but because it appears to be of crucial significance to a number of research directions within contemporary HCI. As is the crux of this workshop, notions of craft are becoming increasingly relevant within the study of human relations with technology (Rosner and Taylor, 2011). Beyond this, there is increased attention to how ideas related to ‘design in use’ might play in an increased sense of participation with, and through, digital technologies (Ehn, 2008). Therefore, we appear to be in a period where users are becoming implicated as crafters of their own digital experiences, through their engagement with computationally augmented (im)material.
Papers by Martyn Woodward
Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2019
There have been strong calls to develop the study of sensory embodied scholarship in sport and ph... more There have been strong calls to develop the study of sensory embodied scholarship in sport and physical culture that is open for all academic fields to consider. Work so far relies largely upon the sensory intelligence of the researcher in auto/ethnographic approaches and drawing as a traditional arts-based visual methods approach is rare. This paper seeks to address this situation by offering an original example of a participant-generated drawing methodology to explore lived experience of yoga. To do so we utilise phenomenology to frame our position on the mind-body-world relationship as it relates to the goals and practice of yoga and of drawing as an embodied gesture. We offer visual-led interpretations of drawings produced by participants after yoga practice, of composition strategies and the verbal explanations they invite. The drawings created new and valuable empirical and methodological insights into how the environment or world is attended to by yoga practitioners as part of a sensory emplaced experience, and opened up new dialogues and exchanges of data between the fields of sport and art and of the challenges of investigating lived sensory experience in this way. Our findings provide an original example of how drawings and arts-based knowledge might be incorporated into a sensory embodied research agenda in sport and physical culture. More bridging work between the arts and physical culture is needed to develop methodologies for use with novice drawing participants.
This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood ... more This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. The version of this thesis submitted to Plymouth University is an edited version with copyrighted images removed. For an un-edited version please contact the author.
The emergence of deep history is shaping a contemporary concern with the origins of the human and... more The emergence of deep history is shaping a contemporary concern with the origins of the human and its artifacts, beyond a reliance upon the written word of the (more shallow) past, which has formed a somewhat materialist history constituted by persons and things. Instead of a reliance upon documentary written evidence, a deep history attempts to re-instate the ‘pre-history’ of the written word – a genealogical and archeological history through the traces of human consciousness left within human made artifacts, which themselves become containers for meanings and social relations (Shryock and Smail, 2011). Shryock and Smail insist that materials, just as the written word, contain traces of human kinship relations and exchanges. Seen within fossils, tools, pictures, household items, ecological change and genetic variation, these traces thus ‘document’ a deep history of the human mind, that extends into the material world. Such a reading of a deep history of the human through artifacts,...
This paper reveals how both contemporary and prior views of the nature of the pictorial arts sinc... more This paper reveals how both contemporary and prior views of the nature of the pictorial arts since early modernism have been underpinned by the classical concept of mimesis, and as a result has brought with it a pre-occupation with both representation and the privileging of the visual. Through tracing the concept of mimesis from its Platonic and Aristotelian roots, the paper will reveal how the concept permeated the visual arts during early modernism, particularly through the work of art historian Aby Warburg. The concept remained dominant within art history until the late twentieth century, and still has its lingering grip on the visual within non-representational models. In discussing ‘the more than visual’ nature of the pictorial image, the paper draws insight from ‘enactivist’ literature; particularly Francisco Varela’s concept of ‘perceptual guidance by action’ provides a framework within which to theorise perception as structured by movement and action, and as such the whole m...
The International Journal of Design Education
Recent theoretical and philosophical movements within the study of material culture are more care... more Recent theoretical and philosophical movements within the study of material culture are more carefully attending to the variety of ways in which human artefacts, institutions, and cultural developments extend, shape and alter human cognition over time. Material Engagement Theory (MET) in particular has set out to map, explore and understand the relational nature of mind and material world as can be read through cultural artefacts. Within the context of MET, the neurological concept of metaplasticity has been expanded to include the affective domains of technology, materials, and things in the neurological development and architecture of the plastic human mind; a 'transactional' relationship between a plastic mind and a plastic material world that are correlated at the ontological level. The challenges of mapping this metaplasticity of mind lie in understanding how the mind and material culture should be understood in relation to the constantly changing lifeworlds of humans over time; the ecological, social, technological and environmental contexts that form the historical specificity of cognitive development. This paper explores how the historical specificity of metaplasticity can be made tangible through the study of material culture, focusing upon the particular activity of oil painting. It will be argued that paintings can provide clues to the historical speci-ficity of the mind that crosses the lifeworld of human action; the technological, phenomenological, philosophical, material, and social conditions underpinning the creation of a painted mark. Drawing from a range of sources that have a root within a Deleuzian process philosophy, the paper builds an account of painting that can be read as expressing the encultured and historical manipulation of paint as an expressive material in itself; an action rendered visible that express the historical emergence of mind.
A moment with Hugo Munsterberg, in memory of Dr Martha Blassnigg
Quaternary International, 2016
Bodies on the Run is taken form the anthropologist Tim Ingold's most current volume of work that ... more Bodies on the Run is taken form the anthropologist Tim Ingold's most current volume of work that aims at a more reflexive and philosophical approach to that of his applied work within the context of social and cultural anthropology. The chapter offers a useful philosophical reflec-tion upon the study of human artefacts by situating their study within an 'animistic' ontology rather than that of a pre-dominant materialistic ontology that he sees as underpinning a large number of approaches across disciplines that study material culture. Ingold's animism is in many ways informed by the nineteenth century vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) both through his own readings of Berg-son's work (within this and earlier works) as well as through the use of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This Bergsonian flavour to Ingold's writing is particularly evident in the descriptions of the 'creative force' of kinaesthetic (or phenomenal) experience in shap-ing the very structure of the material world, a vital force that Ingold also attributes to the 'animate' material world itself; and the importance of the duration and renewal of human and non-human artefacts as a part of an on-going, emergent, phenomenal world of human experience.
Of particular relevance are Ingold’s notions of correspondence — that reconfigure a subject-object dichotomy between the phenomenal world and the external world; and transduction, that describes the manipula- tion and experience of artefacts not in terms of an interaction but in terms of a conversion of kinetic energy between registers of the organic and inorganic. These philosophical ideas Ingold uses to reflect upon some central topics such as mind, agency and object that lie at the cen- tre of archaeology, anthropology, and architecture.
This paper looks at the notion of the optical printer, its history, and its use in artists’ film ... more This paper looks at the notion of the optical printer, its history, and its use in artists’ film and video, and in film archival practice as a philosophical apparatus. The basis for this enquiry relates to a wider project concerned with radical interpretations and strategies of moving-image archival practice. Using the lens of materialist media theories – in the first instance, the concept of ‘discourse networks’ – the paper speculates on theories of understanding in order to explore the production of the image itself and how it is ‘received’.
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Papers delivered by Martyn Woodward
A media archaeology of artistic objects would require a different approach to that of media technologies; one that can account for the plurality of agents, but more importantly a plurality of consciousness from which the work itself is brought forth — the processes by which the artwork comes into being leaves its trace upon its material form (Crowther, 2011; Merleau-Ponty, 1961). An artistic reflection upon a media archaeology of artefacts, such as a photographers contact sheet and photographic images themselves, will be used to elaborate upon the non material affective forces that constitute its ontology; the consciousness of the artist, materials and the technologies, that bring the work into existence.
This paper will elucidate these points and aim to reveal the importance of an ontological and philosophical understanding of artefacts for the emerging media archaeological and art historical discourses within the humanities.
Crowther, P. (2011) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1961) ‘Eye and Mind,’ Translated by Eddie, J.M., in Eddie, J.M.
(ed) The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Reprint, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159-190.
Shryock, A. and Smail, D. (2011) Deep History: The Architecture of the Past and
Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zielinski, S. (2008) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. London: The MIT Press.
The creative intermingling of material world and experience is what Tim Ingold (2013) describes as a correspondence in which we do not so much inter-act with a static world as always correspond with an animate one; properties are more like ‘qualities’ of an emergent whole that take on certain characteristic of what they correspond too. Artefacts such as kites, lasso’s and baskets (Ingold, 2013) express this correspondence of human, environment and material worlds through their formal structures, styles and use, and the changes of these features over time. This paper will focus attention upon the style of human artefacts by borrowing from the phenomenological tradition of painting (Crowther, 2011, 2012; Merleau-Ponty, 1961), describing how the compositional strategies and qualities of line give a visual expression to a particular way of acting in the world. Such an expression is a process of rendering visible the invisible temperament and experience of the artist that are intermingled with the ‘properties’ (or forces) of the environment that emerge in correspondence; the canvas, the brush, the paint, and environmental conditions — offering empirical access to the historical ‘qualities’ of the material world that that practitioners movements corresponds too.
This paper, through a juxtaposition of diverse visual ephemera drawn from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century: that of geological images, biblical depictions, modern painting, satirical illustrations and everyday depictions of emerging technologies, will trace the 'deep time' aspects of the development of a historically contingent imagination, cognition and perception that manifest within such depictions of the human form. Utilising especially the anthropological concept of meshwork (Ingold, 2011), and the neuroarchaeological concept of 'enactive signification' (Malafouris, 2007), this paper will point to an approach to the study of the development of human depictions that acknowledges the material and immaterial dimensions of human cognition and perception. By juxtaposing these approaches with that of contemporary art historical methods (Papapetros, 2012) it will point particularly to the importance of the multi-sensory, imaginary and spiritual dimensions of cognition that will be argued as entangled within the meshworks of material
engagement.
References
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London, Routledge.
Malafouris, L. 2007. Before and beyond representation: towards an enactive conception of the Palaeolithic image. In: Renfrew, C. and Morley, I. (eds.) Image and Imagination: A Global History of Figurative Representation. Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. pp. 289–302.
Papapetros, S. 2012. On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Shryock, A. and Smail, D. (eds) 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley, University of
California Press.
_______
We ask the above question not because we can answer it but because it appears to be of crucial significance to a number of research directions within contemporary HCI. As is the crux of this workshop, notions of craft are becoming increasingly relevant within the study of human relations with technology (Rosner and Taylor, 2011). Beyond this, there is increased attention to how ideas related to ‘design in use’ might play in an increased sense of participation with, and through, digital technologies (Ehn, 2008). Therefore, we appear to be in a period where users are becoming implicated as crafters of their own digital experiences, through their engagement with computationally augmented (im)material.
Papers by Martyn Woodward
Of particular relevance are Ingold’s notions of correspondence — that reconfigure a subject-object dichotomy between the phenomenal world and the external world; and transduction, that describes the manipula- tion and experience of artefacts not in terms of an interaction but in terms of a conversion of kinetic energy between registers of the organic and inorganic. These philosophical ideas Ingold uses to reflect upon some central topics such as mind, agency and object that lie at the cen- tre of archaeology, anthropology, and architecture.
A media archaeology of artistic objects would require a different approach to that of media technologies; one that can account for the plurality of agents, but more importantly a plurality of consciousness from which the work itself is brought forth — the processes by which the artwork comes into being leaves its trace upon its material form (Crowther, 2011; Merleau-Ponty, 1961). An artistic reflection upon a media archaeology of artefacts, such as a photographers contact sheet and photographic images themselves, will be used to elaborate upon the non material affective forces that constitute its ontology; the consciousness of the artist, materials and the technologies, that bring the work into existence.
This paper will elucidate these points and aim to reveal the importance of an ontological and philosophical understanding of artefacts for the emerging media archaeological and art historical discourses within the humanities.
Crowther, P. (2011) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1961) ‘Eye and Mind,’ Translated by Eddie, J.M., in Eddie, J.M.
(ed) The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Reprint, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159-190.
Shryock, A. and Smail, D. (2011) Deep History: The Architecture of the Past and
Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zielinski, S. (2008) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. London: The MIT Press.
The creative intermingling of material world and experience is what Tim Ingold (2013) describes as a correspondence in which we do not so much inter-act with a static world as always correspond with an animate one; properties are more like ‘qualities’ of an emergent whole that take on certain characteristic of what they correspond too. Artefacts such as kites, lasso’s and baskets (Ingold, 2013) express this correspondence of human, environment and material worlds through their formal structures, styles and use, and the changes of these features over time. This paper will focus attention upon the style of human artefacts by borrowing from the phenomenological tradition of painting (Crowther, 2011, 2012; Merleau-Ponty, 1961), describing how the compositional strategies and qualities of line give a visual expression to a particular way of acting in the world. Such an expression is a process of rendering visible the invisible temperament and experience of the artist that are intermingled with the ‘properties’ (or forces) of the environment that emerge in correspondence; the canvas, the brush, the paint, and environmental conditions — offering empirical access to the historical ‘qualities’ of the material world that that practitioners movements corresponds too.
This paper, through a juxtaposition of diverse visual ephemera drawn from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century: that of geological images, biblical depictions, modern painting, satirical illustrations and everyday depictions of emerging technologies, will trace the 'deep time' aspects of the development of a historically contingent imagination, cognition and perception that manifest within such depictions of the human form. Utilising especially the anthropological concept of meshwork (Ingold, 2011), and the neuroarchaeological concept of 'enactive signification' (Malafouris, 2007), this paper will point to an approach to the study of the development of human depictions that acknowledges the material and immaterial dimensions of human cognition and perception. By juxtaposing these approaches with that of contemporary art historical methods (Papapetros, 2012) it will point particularly to the importance of the multi-sensory, imaginary and spiritual dimensions of cognition that will be argued as entangled within the meshworks of material
engagement.
References
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London, Routledge.
Malafouris, L. 2007. Before and beyond representation: towards an enactive conception of the Palaeolithic image. In: Renfrew, C. and Morley, I. (eds.) Image and Imagination: A Global History of Figurative Representation. Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. pp. 289–302.
Papapetros, S. 2012. On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Shryock, A. and Smail, D. (eds) 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley, University of
California Press.
_______
We ask the above question not because we can answer it but because it appears to be of crucial significance to a number of research directions within contemporary HCI. As is the crux of this workshop, notions of craft are becoming increasingly relevant within the study of human relations with technology (Rosner and Taylor, 2011). Beyond this, there is increased attention to how ideas related to ‘design in use’ might play in an increased sense of participation with, and through, digital technologies (Ehn, 2008). Therefore, we appear to be in a period where users are becoming implicated as crafters of their own digital experiences, through their engagement with computationally augmented (im)material.
Of particular relevance are Ingold’s notions of correspondence — that reconfigure a subject-object dichotomy between the phenomenal world and the external world; and transduction, that describes the manipula- tion and experience of artefacts not in terms of an interaction but in terms of a conversion of kinetic energy between registers of the organic and inorganic. These philosophical ideas Ingold uses to reflect upon some central topics such as mind, agency and object that lie at the cen- tre of archaeology, anthropology, and architecture.
This model of creativity is embedded within particular ‘matter-form’ models of creation, such as that of ‘hylomorphism’ (Simondon, 1992), which have become axiomatic across much of Western art and media theory,1 histo- ry and philosophy.2 This theory maintains that an artefact (a statue, for example, or a basket)
is created by the imposition of a pre-defined form (morphe) by the practitioner upon an external inert material (hyle). Its creation is understood in terms of a design specification applied to a material, which can be traced back to a pre-designed form in the mind of the hu- man agent.
This paper, in contrast, proceeds from the claim that the mind cannot be confined to the brain or body of the practitioner, as accounts of the ‘extended mind’ reveal,3 but extends into the wider components and processes of the environment, which include that of an en- ergised matter. As such, what can be termed as the ‘inspiration’, ‘impulse’ or indeed ‘intuition’ underlying the human creative process cannot be fully accounted for by human agency, but requires a framework that can encompass a more distributed account of human creativity."